Hullo. I'm Dani.

Our lives were always tangent: A tango of touch and go With photograph moments That never seem to fade.

Breaths slip Past lips, Forward in time, Down thin jumpers And loose shirts.

Greedy hands stretch From the back of my mind,

Rewind cassette tapes back years and years To whispers exchanged Across three sided cells,

To eyes wandering past the present, To eyes watching vague gallops of the future, Oblivious to their empty pages, Oblivious to today’s bliss.

You and I Patched up holes in each others armour Made by careless words Yelled from rooftops By knights and maidens Too small for the platforms they occupy.

You and I Lay across intersections At 3 AM, Pretend the headlights were comets And we were spaceships Lightyear-speed-catapulting through space.

But the next season took you away, Asteroid-stole you from my core, And you explored your side of space Unaware of the patch of grass I’d saved In the event you’d land back down beside me, Feel the breeze in your hair again, Tell me how much larger Orion was from up there.

But we became parallel lines, Fingertips away, Weary from straining, Forgetting how to pronounce familiar greetings, Losing each other in shadows of memory,

Losing place From where the years have filled us up With new holes We’ve learned to patch up With hollow hands Meant for holding, Used for hiding.

Hands used For twirling telephone lines, For hesitating over keypad letters, For the backspace.

Hands used To search For the backspace:

Days of carefree laughter And nonexistent ‘apart’s, When we dreamt of free roads And bare feet.

In the late stages of fetal programming,We grew wings instead of arms.And they called us strange,Put us up on a golden stageFor others to wonderHow science went wrong.Instead, They dreamt of the skyAnd the way the clouds felt against raw red cheeks.They wokeWith burned facesAnd guns in their chests,Seeking vengeance against invisible causes.

So they turn their nozzles at us instead,Aiming at our wings,Forgetting we can fly.

Far away,To empty forests And distant shores.

We weave silken webs with our fingers,Spin fibred thread between the treesIn place of treehouses.You said we’d lay here forever,Watch the stars prove their existence in the horizon,Forget the way their presence serves as a mere memory

The same way we forgot The location of our websWhen the guns found our beds,When we’d left

Always assuming we’d known the way back.

The same way we forgot Until silken strings grew heavy with dustAnd dreams we’d left behind were laden with rot.